FALLUJAH: Shootings and bombings killed six Iraqi security forces members and an academic on Wednesday, while an inmate detonated explosives in a Baghdad prison in an attempted suicide attack, officials said.

Gunmen killed four police near Fallujah, west of Baghdad, a police captain and a medical source said, while gunmen in Mahmudiyah, south of the capital, shot intelligence service Captain Muntasser Abdul Rizzaq, according to an interior ministry official.

A doctor said Rizzaq later died in Mahmudiyah Hospital.

Gunmen armed with silenced weapons killed a policeman at a checkpoint east of Mosul in north Iraq, a police officer and a doctor said.

And a magnetic "sticky bomb" killed a department head in the College of Agriculture on the Tikrit University campus, a police lieutenant colonel and a doctor said.

The interior ministry official also said that an inmate belonging to Al-Qaeda blew himself up in the prison in central Baghdad, wounding three guards and a fellow prisoner.

"The prisoner was able to gather the explosives over a number of days" and apparently formed them into an explosive belt, the official said, without providing details on the source of the explosives.

A police officer confirmed that the bomber survived the blast and was taken to Al-Kindi hospital.

Justice ministry spokesman Haidar al-Saadi said in an emailed statement that the bomber, named as Ahmed Majid Hamid al-Shammari, had been sentenced to death under Iraq's anti-terrorism law, and that he used fuel from cigarette lighters in the attack.

The bombing came a day after prisoners were allowed family visits, Saadi said, without specifying if Shammari's family had visited him, or if it was suspected that materials used in the attack had been smuggled in that way.

Prisons in Iraq are periodically hit by escape attempts, uprisings and other unrest. (AFP)